But you can secretly feel proud: even though the mentor is strong, the ritual would not have been possible without his help, an ignoramus. No matter how you look at it, you need a guide, someone who will serve as a beacon and an anchor, from whom a thread or a thick rope will stretch – as strong as you can – from the world of the living into the twilight of the Edge.
– Save-ee-ee!!! – a wild scream mixed with a squeal, which can only be emitted by a girl frightened to death, broke the silence into fragments. A lathered horse rushed out of the dense thickets of hazel trees, breaking branches; in the dim light of the moon, Marius clearly saw bulging, bloodshot eyes and flakes of foam on the skin shining with ripe chestnut. The brain noted that the horse was scared to death, no worse than the rider, the gaze, tearing away from the mentor, became attached to the thin figure in a tight dress, the body twitched treacherously to help the damsel in distress, to stop the racing horse. But he had to stand straight and watch only the master!
The bay horse crashed against an invisible barrier – for the duration of the ritual, the circle of the Mirror is not in the world of the living, but on the Edge, where there is no place for mortals with a still beating heart. It burst out and, as if the meeting with an otherworldly obstacle was the last straw, it slowly fell onto the black stones. Marius even shuddered from a surge of necroemanations, much more powerful than from deer killed in a hunt. The maiden flew out of the saddle with a desperate squeal, head over heels, over the head of the falling bay. Straight into the circle made by the death of the horse! And it would be okay to just join a circle, although this would not lead to anything good, but! This… shriek! She somersaulted right to the center of the Mirror, knocked Master Turvon off his feet and fell straight on top of him! And she froze, because now, in the midst of the activated ritual, her soul was guaranteed to go to the same place where the soul of the master necromancer wandered.
And what, one wonders, could a person who is not completely ignorant, but a categorical dropout, do in this difficult situation?!
First of all, don’t panic. This rule, true for any sudden problems, was hammered into the student not only by Master Turvon, but also by his father before him, from early childhood. And Marius, fully aware that he did not know what was “right,” instantly decided to do the only thing he could and that seemed to suggest itself. He continued to pour power into the thread that connected him with the master, preventing it from breaking and the necromancer’s soul from getting lost without a return path to the world. The connection, however, after the girl’s spectacular fall across the teacher’s body, behaved strangely. It twitched and tossed around, like an angry huge fish caught on a fishing rod that was too weak – it was about to break, but it didn’t break, it would tangle the tackle, hook it on a snag and… and still break. It became more and more difficult to hold on, not to let go, at some point Marius even imagined that at the other end there had happened, no less than, a fight, as if two hungry greedy fish were grappling with a tasty worm. Oh, if only he wasn’t that worm himself! How can creatures from the dark world, for whom there is nothing more desirable than warm human blood, get through the connection? How bad it is to be a dropout; he doesn’t even know what to expect, what to be afraid of, what can happen and what won’t happen for sure! And the master is also good, if only he could explain in detail all the dangers of broken or disrupted rituals, and how to deal with them! And he only said once, at the very beginning: